Duplicate Pages - Correct SEO Labelling

[Mich]

Hey Guys

More of a SEO question than local SEO but this forum is so good I thought I'd just post it here

Ok so let's say you have a page that is a complete duplicate of another page - you use it to split test headlines.

I have used a canonical ref to point to the original page. Do I also tag this page as no-index? Or do I want Google to index it but index it with the canonical tag I've made?

Thanks!

 

[James Watt]

I don't know the 'best practice' answer... but is there any reason you'd actually want that second page indexed or not? My understanding, is the canonical tag would fix any duplicate content issue. I feel like this is a specific version of the same things people deal with on heavily dynamic sites... and same advice for them probably goes here.

As long as you don't have any backlinks pointing towards the 'B' in your split test, I think it doesn't matter all that much either way. The main reason I'd think the no index would be useful, is if you had a big enough site that extra fluff caused spidering issues where not everything was seen... but I can't image a simple 2 page deal like that would cause any issues with that.

I'm by no means an expert on this though.

 

[Mich]

Thanks. The reason I was thinking is that I have read in a few places that the % of pages on your site that are indexed might be an SEO factor.

For example, if your site has 200 pages and only 100 indexed - then this 50% ratio might impact your SEO.

Of course, in my case, it isn't a huge amount but I was wondering if there might be any impact!

 

[DanLeibson]

If you canonicalize and no-index, follow the testing page you should be fine. You can also use a tool like Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer to do JavaScript injection and split-test headlines on a single URL.